Tom Wolfe wrote his surfing-themed "Pump House Gang" essay in 1966. The same title was used for Wolfe's 1968 book, made up of 15 stories that had been published over the previous two years, either in the London Weekend Telegraph or the Sunday magazine section of the New York World Journal Tribune. An excerpt from Wolfe's Introduction to the Pump House Gang is presented here.

I wrote all but two of these stories in one ten-month stretch after the publication of my first book, 

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

. It was a strange time for me. Many rogue volts of euphoria. I went from one side of this country to the other and then from one side of England to the other. The people I met—the things they did—I was entranced. I met Carol Doda. She blew up her breasts with emulsified silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, and became the greatest resource of the San Francisco tourist industry. I met a group of surfers, the Pump House Gang. They attended the Watts riot as if it were the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena. They came to watch “the drunk niggers” and were reprimanded by the same for their rowdiness. In London I met a competitive 17-year-old named Nicki who got one-up on her schoolgirl chums by taking a Kurdish clubfoot lover. I met a £9-a-week office boy named Larry Lynch. He spent his lunch hour every day with hundreds of other child laborers in the crazed pitch-black innards of a noonday nightclub called Tiles. All of them 

 from the frug, the rock ’n’ roll, and God knows what else, for an hour—then back to work. In Chicago I met Hugh Hefner. He revolved on his bed, offering scenic notes as his head floated by.

Southern California, I found, is a veritable paradise of statuspheres. For example, the move to age segregation. There are old people’s housing developments, private developments, in which no one under 50 may buy a home. There are apartment developments for single persons 20 to 30 only. The Sunset Strip in Los Angeles has become the exclusive hangout of the 16 to 25 set. In 1966 they came close to street warfare to keep it that way, against the police who moved in to “clean up.”

And . . . the Pump House Gang. Here was a group of boys and girls who had banded together in a way that superficially resembled a street gang’s. They had very little of the street gang’s motivation, however. They came from middle-class and upper-middle-class homes in perhaps the most high-class beach community in California, La Jolla. They had very little sense of resentment toward their parents or “society” and weren’t rebels. Their only “alienation” was the usual hassle of the adolescent, the feeling that he is being prodded into adulthood on somebody else’s terms. So they did the latest thing. They split off—

— and started their own league, based on the esoterica of surfing. They didn’t resent the older people around them; they came to pity the old bastards because they couldn’t partake of this esoteric statusphere.

The day I met the Pump House Gang, a group of them had just been thrown out of “Tom Coman’s garage,” as it was known. The next summer they moved up from the garage life to a group of apartments near the beach, a complex they named “La Colonia Tijuana.” But this time some were shifting from the surfing life to the advance guard of something else—the psychedelic 

 world of California. That is another story. But even the 

, as the heads came to be known, did not develop 

. Their so-called “dropping out” was nothing more than a still further elaboration of the kind of worlds that the surfers and the car kids I met—“The Hair Boys”—had been creating the decade before.

The Pump House Gang lived as though age segregation were a permanent state, as if it were inconceivable that any of them would ever grow old, i.e., 25. I foresaw the day when the California coastline would be littered with the bodies of aged and abandoned 

In fact, however, many of these kids seem to be able to bring the mental atmosphere of the surfer life forward with them into adulthood—even into the adult world where you have to make a living. I remember going to the motorcycle races at Gardena, California, which is just south of Watts, with a surfer who is now about 30 and has developed a large water-sport equipment business. This was a month after the Watts riots. We were sitting in the stands at Gardena. The motorcycles were roaring around the half-mile track below and flashing under the lights. Just beyond the track from where we sat were Watts and Compton.

“Tom,” he said to me, “you should have been here last month.”

“The riots,” he said. “You should have been here. We were all sitting here right where we are now and the bikes were going around down below here. And over here”—over to the left you could look over the edge of the stands and see the highway—“the National Guard units were pulling up and jumping off the trucks and getting into formation and everything with the bayonets and all. It was terrific. And then, there”— and his gaze and his voice got a far-off quality, going beyond the track and toward Watts—“and there, there in the distance, was Los Angeles . . . 

TOM WOLFE "PUMP HOUSE GANG" BONUS MATERIAL

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